Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Canadian town tells migrants: you can’t kill women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HerouxvilleImmigrants wishing to live in the small Canadian town of Herouxville, Quebec, must not stone women to death in public, burn them alive or throw acid on them, according to an extraordinary set of rules released by the local council.

The declaration, published on the town’s Web site, has deepened tensions in the predominantly French-speaking province over how tolerant Quebecers should be toward the customs and traditions of immigrants.

“We wish to inform these new arrivals that the way of life which they abandoned when they left their countries of origin cannot be recreated here,” said the declaration. “Therefore we consider it completely outside these norms to … kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them etc.”

Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, said the declaration had “set the clock back for decades” as far as race relations were concerned. “I was shocked and insulted to see these kinds of false stereotypes and ignorance about Islam and our religion … in a public document written by people in authority who discriminate openly,” he told Reuters.

Reuters, 30 January 2007

See also BBC News, 31 January 2007

Cameron fails to understand threat of fascist BNP to British society

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UAF_logoAnti-fascist campaigners have criticised David Cameron’s attack on the Muslim community organisations, which he compared to the BNP. Weyman Bennett, Joint Secretary of UAF said:

“The BNP represent the real threat to community cohesion, with their racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic politics. The BNP whips up racist hatred and division for electoral gain, leading to attacks on all minority communities in areas they target.

“It is deeply offensive to liken the BNP to minority community organisations, particularly to Muslim groups who are the prime target of the BNP’s racism. Muslim communities experience racism and discrimination at all levels of society. They are being vilified and targeted daily.

“Mainstream parties have a responsibility not to provide succour to fascists: today, the BNP welcomes David Cameron’s comments on its website as a ‘propaganda victory’ for them and takes the opportunity to spread further Islamophobic bile against Muslim communities. Attacking multiculturalism is pandering to the BNP.”

Unite Against Fascism news report, 30 January 2007

Cameron attacks ‘Muslim hardliners’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Cameron 2David Cameron yesterday endorsed a new Conservative report which condemned the “hardline” views of the Muslim Council of Britain and other Islamic groups. The Conservative leader argued that the Government must not bow to the “loudest voices” in the Muslim community when he attended the launch of the report by his national and international security policy group.

The report, Uniting the Country, singled out the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), widely seen as the mainstream voice of Muslims in the UK, for allowing “hardline members… to dominate policy and crowd out more moderate voices.”

The Tory policy group, chaired by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, also challenged the MCB’s approval of extremist clerics like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who supports the death penalty for gays, as well as its failure to participate in Holocaust Memorial Day.

Mr Cameron said: “Policy makers should stop assuming that the loudest voices and the most organised elements within the Muslim community necessarily represent the Muslim population as a whole. There’s a danger that groups with agendas aimed at separation rather than integration are deferred to when they should be challenged.”

Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2007

In an accompanying editorial, the Telegraph applauds Cameron and the Tories for “laying bare the perils of multiculturalism”.

For a response by the MCB, see the Guardian, 31 January 2007

See also MCB news release, 30 January 2007

As for the fascists of the British National Party, they criticise Cameron’s attack on multiculturalism and Muslim organisations on the grounds that it falls short of “dismantling the structures of the multicultural State and restoring our lost ancestral rights and freedoms”. BNP news article, 30 January 2007

Cameron’s speech misses the point, says British Muslim Initiative

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The BMI is deeply concerned with Conservative party’s and its leader David Cameron’s renewed attack on Muslim organisations and on Multiculturalism. It is their attack on Multiculturalism and freedom of religion that will divide Britain and weaken national cohesion. In stating that those who call for considering the religious duties of Muslims, as others, within the law are trying to divide the community, Mr Cameron is being both obtuse, ignorant and over simplifying the issue.

“Muslims, as is the case with their religious groups and minorities, have certain religious practices that should be upheld in the interests of respecting freedom of religion. These practises are not against the law. Mr Cameron failed, for example, to criticise the Jewish organisations over its imposition of Judaic laws and practices within their communities, while denying the exact same rights to Muslims by suggesting they divide Britain ,” stated Ihtisham Hibatullah of the BMI.

Mr Cameron has failed to correctly identify those individuals who preach hatred, violence and divisions within all communities while instead has chosen to attack mainstream Muslim organisations. His speech and announced polices have only one meaning: he is not keen to deal with the core issues or to build bridges with all communities, that is why he is not trustworthy not only by British Muslims but by all.

British Muslim Initiative press release, 30 January 2007

The point about Judaic laws and practices is well made. The Tory Party report Uniting the Country (pdf here), which Cameron launched, refers to the alleged danger posed by reformist Islamists who are “prepared to use democratic freedoms” in order to establish “a parallel system … of religiously derived law”. They are condemned for pursuing “goals which are destructive of a tolerant and liberal democracy”. Yet I don’t recall the Tory Party denouncing the Jewish community as a threat to western liberal values when the United Synagogue successfully lobbied for an Eruv in Golders Green. If they had, they would have been accused, quite rightly, of pandering to anti-semitism.

Kamm backs Cohen on ‘Left-Islamist alliance’, dismisses Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Oliver Kamm“The alliance of Islamists and Leninists that makes up the Respect coalition is not a dalliance born of opportunism. It reflects an extraordinary process in which part of the left has ended up arguing for what by any objective standards are reactionary positions: promotion of religious obscurantism in place of secularism; segregation of the sexes at public events; abridgement of free speech in deference to the sensibilities of those who claim themselves victims of the phantasm of ‘Islamophobia’….”

Oliver Kamm enthusiastically endorses Nick Cohen’s thesis.

Comment is Free, 30 January 2007

Tories set sights on ‘separatist’ British Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Conservatives will today accuse Islamic groups including the high-profile, mainstream Muslim Council of Britain of promoting separation and ignoring the wishes of the people they represent.

A report by the party’s policy group on national and international security will tear into the MCB as part of a generalised attack on the concept of multiculturalism, which it says has divided people rather than simply respecting their differences. The report will underline comments made by the party’s leader, David Cameron, who warned yesterday that separatist Muslims who promote sharia law and demand special treatment for their faith are the “mirror image” of the British National party.

In an attack on the MCB – which was until recently feted by government ministers – the report says: “Its hardline members tend to dominate policy and crowd out more moderate and varied voices. As a result the MCB’s claim to ‘foster good community relations and work for the good of society as a whole’ is hard to reconcile with some of the positions it has taken.”

Last night Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former diplomat who chairs the policy commission, said multiculturalism “has tended on the whole to emphasise differences between us rather than actually creating a framework in which difference flourishes”.

While stressing that the group was not singling out Muslims, she did criticise the MCB’s approach. “We would like it to say that they actually stand specifically and explicitly for integration,” she told BBC2’s Newsnight. But it “does not in our view take a sufficiently strong stand against that kind of view”. She attacked the MCB’s supportive references to the conservative Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

But on the same programme, Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary of the MCB, said Mr Qaradawi had spoken out against extremism. “In the report, in all its mentions of the Muslim Council of Britain, there’s no mention of any of the positive work we’ve done,” he said. “The MCB is proud to stand for integration. We want British Muslims to play their full role in all aspects of British society, we want obstacles to be removed.”

Guardian, 30 January 2007

For the MCB’s defence of multiculturalism see (pdf) here.

Muslims ‘about to take over Europe’ says Bernard Lewis

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Bernard LewisIslam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar, said on Sunday.

The Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” Lewis said at a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post. Asked what this meant for the continent’s Jews, he responded, “The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim.”

Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe’s future would be, “Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?” The growing sway of Islam in Europe was of particular concern given the rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements, said Lewis.

Lewis, whose numerous books include the recent What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, would set no timetable for this drastic shift in Europe, instead focusing on the process, which he said would be assisted by “immigration and democracy.” Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up.

“Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence,” he said. “They have no respect for their own culture.” Europeans had “surrendered” on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of “self-abasement,” “political correctness” and “multi-culturalism,” said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States.

Jerusalem Post, 29 January 2007

Over at Jihad Watch, raving Islamophobe Robert Spencer observes that the Jerusalem Post report shows that “my areas of agreement with Lewis are much larger than any areas of disagreement I may have with him”.

Blink trashes Policy Exchange report

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An opinion poll claiming to show that multiculturalism has driven Muslim youth to extremism dominated yesterday’s news headlines. But further investigation has shown the Policy Exchange report to be little more than a sham. The first warning signs were the refusal of the think tank to reveal their methodology and the questions they asked.

Closer analysis of the “Living Apart Together” report indicates a high level of spin in the conclusions. Experts say that far from being an “independent” think tank, Policy Exchange is actually a right-wing neo-Con leaning outfit, a reality that journalists failed to spot amid a blitz of media coverage yesterday.

While Policy Exchange claimed 13% of Muslims aged 16 to 24 years old supported Al Qaeda’s war against the West, The 1990 Trust’s survey showed just 1% of those surveyed supported the 7/7 bombings. Ruhul Tarafder, the lead author of the Trust’s report, said:

“Our questions and methodology is in our report for all to see, so there can be no spin. Whereas The 1990 Trust report received little press attention, it is worrying that the media have leapt upon the Policy Exchange report despite so many doubts about the organisation and its findings.

‘When the Policy Exchange claim that 37% of Muslims between 16 and 24 support sharia law, I ask: why is the meaning of sharia not explained in their report? Like the word Jihad, it has a much wider meaning than the Western stereotypes. And did they try to find out the level of understanding about sharia from the people they interviewed? I suspect not.

“This is a deeply flawed report, tailored to fit a right-wing agenda, with its real conclusions hidden from public view.”

BLINK news report, 30 January 2007

Read the 1990 Trust’s survey Muslim views: foreign policy and its effects here.

Express is ‘Shocked by the rise of militant Islam in Britain’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shocked by the rise of militant Islam in Britain

Daily Express, 29 January 2007

Young people are our future, which is why a recent poll of Muslims in the UK gives deep cause for concern. Increasingly, the 16 to 24 age group is rejecting the often moderate beliefs of the older generation in favour of a radical, politicised interpretation of Islam. This is the group which would welcome Sharia law; would like to see women wearing the hijab; and is most likely to admire Al Qaeda.

While other findings are more reassuring (84 per cent of Muslims believe they are treated fairly in British society) it has always been clear that dangerous extremism will spring from a minority which the peaceful majority is unable to contain. This is quite likely to mean parents do not even know that their children have been brainwashed by fundamentalists.

But extremist clerics are not solely to blame. We must also point the finger at the now widely discredited policy of multiculturalism, which has been the constant background music of these young people’s lives. It has encouraged feelings of difference and separateness – and discouraged any sense of pride in being British. The result? Thousands of youngsters harbour sympathy for suicide bombers and despise the society they were born into. Surely an alarming prospect for us all.

Younger Muslims ‘more political’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested. Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange found. The report’s lead author, Munira Mirza, blamed government policy for a growing split between Muslims and non-Muslims.

BBC News, 29 January 2007

Yes, following on from Martin Bright and When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, it’s another “liberal” opponent of Islamism and multiculturalism making common cause with right-wing Islamophobes via Policy Exchange. Interestingly, Munira Mirza is part of the tendency around Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas, which was formerly the Revolutionary Communist Party. Mind you, the libertarian individualism promoted by the ex-RCP these days fits in quite well with Tory values.

For further analysis see Rolled Up Trousers, 29 January 2007 and BBC News, 29 January 2007

The report has been applauded by the fascists as “yet more proof of the growing danger to the UK from Muslim separatism”. See BNP news article, 29 January 2007

The Policy Exchange report Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the paradox of multiculturalism can be downloaded here.